Neither a fool nor a revisionist be. Who am I now to judge what I’d been then? I can’t say I’d not been in love, only that I had been so with the wrong woman. I can’t, either call myself a fool for not having known, but pride will call me names to dissemble from its pain and deny I’d been in love. Why is it so easy to be embarrassed and ashamed? What martydon is being served? What apologies are left? And whose forgiveness is left to ask for? But moving on won’t be accomplished so pragmatically. What I know and how I feel are each a hand of a different body. Neither nor both can affect a solution. In the face of that impotence, it’s easier to ignore the impulse to effort; if the restraint is as stressful as the effort, it is at least more effective. Just a theory. What would I know?

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Comfort is escape, but from what? At what point is it a denial of responsibility? What is the responsibility? It weighs heavily but has a big thumb on the scale. Comfort does not signify contentment of a real kind, but a buffer from the pain of coping with without. I look for comfort in myriad things, but in none do I truly find it, for futility ever leads the pursuit. The horse is dead in the gate. Contentment is not an accumulation of comforts. No number of good books I read, good movies I see, or amount of music I enjoy totals what I am after. In fact, I sometimes think that their absence will reveal the peace I seek, but I fear the void. It’s a theory I can’t bring myself to test. Better the comforts I know….

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It’s always been about me. To you, it’s always been about you. What else? I’m not convinced there is a pure altruism or compassion. (I’d feel all the worse if there were.) I know people who are always giving, but I don’t envy or admire them. Is that why I don’t try harder to give? because I see how so much spent can be so little bought? There is only the asking. Call it a cynic’s view, but it’s what I see, and I don’t call myself a cynic. Who gives that doesn’t ask, however guiltily, for something in return? Why not just ask? It otherwise seems a passive aggression–or, rather, an aggressive passivity. People aren’t subtle. Hints are, at best, resented, but, most often, missed. Rejection is painful, so asking without asking is the safest–and least effective–way to go about getting what one wants. Each path requires a certain painful acceptance, of either ignore-ance or rejection. The path I chose was not the one whose negative outcome I was prepared to handle, and I’m not prepared any better now to take the same tack; but neither am I going to moon about with puppy-dog eyes hoping to be taken in. That leaves me with whining.

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Principle, right as it might seem or be, can still be shaky ground upon which to take a stand. A right to do something is not a duty to do it. Discretion can be too little considered. Rational rightness makes of itself righteousness with a blindly ironic twist of rationale into morality. Where irony prevails, recognized or not, true rightness is excluded. There I stood, Emperor of Righteous, resplendently naked in my meticulously woven cloak of rightness, proclaiming my “every right” to averted faces. What I say now clothes me in my humility, embarrassed over what I displayed. Whatever of my rights I felt at the time to have been trampled upon in the proceedings against me had been merely superseded by a moral duty I would not acknowledge. The principles I stood upon were kicked out from under me by the truth: the pain I’d inflicted. The resentment of my punishment as disproportionate to my crimes recedes as understanding accedes. Sometimes I resent that, too. I can’t recognize the power in humility.